A well-researched compendium of the people who ran the Raj

Nowadays it has become difficult if not impossible to reflect upon the colonial experience in India in anything but the most egregious of terms. Political correctitude seems to demand that any remembrance of colonial times must be in the form of some sort of condemnation. This complicates the historian’s task and most would shy from venturing into the subject for fear of raising controversy.

David Gilmour, one of Britain’s most accomplished historical writers, has however decided to ignore all that and dive headlong into the subject. The result is a magnum opus on the men and women (all British of course) who created, ruled and nurtured British India.

The author makes it clear right in the beginning of the book that his work is primarily about individuals and how they reacted to their Indian experience. “This, then, is not a book about the politics of the British Empire, still less a discussion of whether that empire was good or bad… I am chiefly interested in the motives and identities of British individuals in the Indian territories of the empire, in who these people were and why they went to India, in what they did and how they lived when they got there, and in what they thought and felt about their lives on the subcontinent”, he writes.

The British in India, Gilmour adds in his concluding chapter, “is a social history rather than a political one, and it is about individuals rather than institutions. Yet as ‘the British in India’ is a controversial subject, some concluding reflections may be appropriate… Imperialism, which usually means the conquest and exploitation of one people by another, involves deaths and injustices, but that does not mean that it did nothing positive during its 3,000-year history. Nor does it mean that all imperialists were bad people, though this has been the view of many distinguished intellectuals and academics of our era.”

Gilmour presents a meticulously researched compendium of British people, many of them extraordinary, who came to India for various reasons, most to make money and a career, others to flee from the long arm of the law, and some to improve what was viewed as a poor, backward country. The book covers a span of three and a half centuries — starting from the period after the death of Queen Elizabeth I to the reign of Queen Elizabeth II.

Read: The British affection for modern India is very strong

Few writers would have embarked on such an ambitious project and one that would have required a prodigious amount of research. But India is familiar territory for Gilmour, who has written on the lives of Lord Curzon and Rudyard Kipling. He has also authored a book titled, The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj, which is considered an acclaimed study of the administrators of Victorian India.

The British in India By David Gilmour, Allen Lane pp 622, Rs 999

Gilmour seems to have felt compelled to write a book about the intimate relationship Britain once enjoyed with India, primarily because “much of Britain’s relationship with India, especially at a personal and popular level, has very quickly been forgotten.”

While this book about the motley collection of Britishers who lived, ruled and often died in India, is primarily written for a British audience, there is much in it of interest to the Indian reader. Even though the colonial experience was appalling for most Indians, it doesn’t mean that nobody should write about that period without constantly reiterating how terrible the whole thing was.

Many of the British were indeed brutal racists, products of an age and civilisation that considered the dark natives an inferior race needed to be guided out of barbarity. This self-righteousness was not something peculiar to the British. The Mughals, Persians and Afghans who invaded and ruled India prior to the British, all believed in their right to rule over the largely uncivilised population of the subcontinent.

It would be silly in today’s day and age to deny that many of the British who came to India to trade, fight and govern deserve a place in history. Indians on the whole have an ambivalent view of the bygone British Raj and don’t look upon it as an unmitigated calamity or an age of complete darkness. While they might not admire the strange, pugnacious men who came to rule over them, many Indians will find their three centuries and more association with their country fascinating to look back upon.

“I have been visiting India over a period of nearly half a century and have never had a row — scarcely an argument — about the nature of the Raj. I have worked in several other countries, both in Europe and in Asia, but in none have I found it easier to make close and enduring friendships”, he writes. “Writing about the relationship between Britain and India today, the Indian historian Ramachandra Guha has said that it is of course political and economic, but it is social and cultural as well, and also emotional, adding that, ‘of all relations between former colony and erstwhile empire, this one is the least acrimonious’. No doubt the chief reason for this is the magnanimity of the Indian character, but another might be that British imperialism in India was not always quite so bad as its detractors (especially the home-grown ones) have claimed.”